The Erosion of a Quiet Certainty Part 3 by Goh Ling Yong
I found it at the bottom of a box filled with old university textbooks and forgotten dreams: a small, brass compass. The casing was cool against my palm, tarnished with the ghost of fingerprints from a younger, more certain version of myself. I flicked the lid open. The needle, once a faithful servant to the planet’s magnetic pull, shivered and spun, a frantic dancer with no rhythm, pointing everywhere and nowhere at once.
It felt like a perfect, cruel metaphor for the place I found myself.
There was a time when my life felt like a well-drawn map. Each street was labeled, each destination marked with a neat, confident ‘X’. I believed in True North. Not just the geographical kind, but a personal, spiritual one. It was a quiet certainty that hummed beneath the surface of my days, a belief that if I just listened closely enough, if I followed the signs and did the ‘right’ things, the path would unfold exactly as it was meant to. This certainty was my bedrock, the solid ground upon which I built everything.
But bedrock can be eroded. Not by a single, cataclysmic earthquake, but by the slow, patient work of the tide. A thousand tiny waves of doubt, disappointment, and stark reality lapping against the shore of belief. A career path that led to a quiet, barren plateau instead of a summit. A relationship that ended not with a bang, but with the silent, mutual recognition that we were reading from different maps entirely. The simple, unnerving observation that chance, more than destiny, seemed to be the primary architect of the lives around me.
Each instance was a hairline fracture in the foundation. Together, they had left me standing on shifting sands, the compass in my hand utterly useless.
My Uncle Teck tends to bonsai trees. His balcony is a miniature forest of gnarled junipers, delicate maples, and resilient ficus trees, each one a living sculpture in a shallow ceramic pot. He spends hours there, a pair of concave cutters in his hand, his movements as slow and deliberate as a monk in meditation.
I went to him one sweltering afternoon, the broken compass heavy in my pocket. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Advice? Absolution? A new map?
He was wiring a new branch on a Japanese black pine, his brow furrowed in concentration. The air smelled of damp earth, jasmine, and the faint, sharp scent of pine sap. He didn’t look up as I sat on the low wooden stool beside him. He simply gestured to the thermos of chrysanthemum tea on the table.
“The roots are the most important part,” he said, his voice a low rumble. He wasn't talking to me, not really, but to the tree. “If the roots are not strong, the wind will take everything.”
I watched his calloused fingers gently coax a thin copper wire around a young, green shoot, guiding its direction. “How do you know which way it’s supposed to grow?” I asked, the question feeling foolish as soon as it left my lips.
Uncle Teck finally paused, setting his cutters down with a soft click. He looked at me, his eyes holding the kind of deep, unhurried calm that only comes from decades of watching things grow.
“Supposed to?” he echoed, a slight smile playing on his lips. “The tree doesn’t know what it’s ‘supposed to’ be. It only knows how to reach for the sun. I just help it find a beautiful way to do it. Sometimes I have to cut away a branch that is growing strong, but in the wrong direction, so that a smaller one has a chance. Sometimes, a branch dies for no reason at all. There is no map, Ling Yong.”
He picked up a small watering can and began to gently moisten the soil of a maple whose leaves were the colour of a blushing sunset. “We think we want a map. What we really want is control. But you cannot control the wind, or the rain, or the pests that come in the night. You can only tend to the soil. You can only strengthen the roots.”
His words didn't offer a solution. They just held up a mirror to my own frantic search. I had been so focused on finding True North, on my destination, that I had forgotten to tend to my own soil. I was looking for an anchor to be dropped from the heavens, a great, heavy thing that would hold me fast against the shifting tides. I never considered that the anchor might be something I had to build myself, right here in the unsteady sand.
The Goh Ling Yong who once believed his life was a story already written, who saw meaning in every coincidence and a sign in every stray feather, was gone. He’d been washed away by those quiet, persistent waves. In his place was someone… quieter. More hesitant. And, terrifyingly, more free.
The erosion of a quiet certainty is a painful, disorienting process. It feels like loss, because it is. You lose the comfort of knowing, the safety of a predictable narrative. You are left standing in the vast, open space of uncertainty, with no compass to guide you and no map to follow.
My moment of transformation wasn’t a lightning strike of clarity. It was smaller, quieter. It happened weeks after my visit with Uncle Teck. I was sitting by the Kallang River, watching the late afternoon sun shatter into a million pieces on the water’s surface. A bumboat chugged past, its wake creating a cascade of ripples that lapped gently against the concrete steps where I sat.
For months, I had been trying to piece my old beliefs back together, to glue the fragments of my map into something coherent. I was trying to find a new True North, a different but equally rigid system to believe in.
But watching the water, I finally understood what Uncle Teck meant. The water had no destination. It simply was. It moved, it reflected the light, it supported the boat. Its nature was to flow. The ripples spread outwards, changed the surface for a moment, and then settled back into stillness.
My anchor wasn't a point on a compass. It couldn't be. An anchor, by definition, is static, and life is anything but.
The anchor is the act of showing up. It’s the feel of the sun on your skin. It’s the taste of hot tea on a rainy day. It’s the messy, imperfect, and deeply human work of connection. It’s the patience to tend to your own roots, even when you have no idea what the branches will look like. It’s the conversation with the tree, not the command. It is the verb, not the noun.
I took the broken compass out of my pocket. The needle still spun wildly, a tiny, chaotic storm trapped in a brass cage. For the first time, I didn’t feel a pang of loss. I didn’t feel the need to fix it.
The sand will always shift. The winds will change. The quiet certainty I lost was an illusion of control, a beautiful and comforting mirage in a vast and unpredictable desert. The search for a new one was just a search for a better mirage.
My new anchor is not a belief, but a practice. The practice of presence. The practice of compassion for the person I am today, not the person I thought I was supposed to be. The practice of finding beauty not in the perfectly executed plan, but in the resilience of a branch that grows in a new direction after a storm.
I still don’t know where I am going. The map is gone for good. But I am learning to stand on the shifting sands, to feel the grains between my toes, and to trust that I have the strength to take the next step, even without knowing where it will land. And for now, that is more than enough. It is everything.
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